


Masquerade

by SunbunSky



Category: Cardfight!! Vanguard
Genre: Closeted Character, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 14:21:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12367581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SunbunSky/pseuds/SunbunSky
Summary: Wear your mask day by day, ease all your sorrows away.Who are you deceiving?





	Masquerade

**Author's Note:**

> Uh so I apologize in advance if this whole thing reads as extremely self-pitying
> 
> Also this has lots of references to enforced gender roles and deals with social dysphoria/internalized transphobia (I guess?? idk if there's a better term for this giant mess), and there isn't really a "good" ending in the traditional coming out and being yourself sense, so....yeah

There’s a lump in your throat.

Nothing is  _ wrong _ , per say - unusual perhaps, but your father has certainly come to visit before, bringing foreign gifts and welcome stories along in his pockets. 

His faux-leather jacket weighs down on your shoulders, heavy and pressing, dragging behind you along the wooden floor. The sleeves are too long for your arms, and the collar rises to the tips of your ears, but the fabric is warm and worn from its travels far outside your narrow scope of tiny school yards and bustling parks in the spring. A reminder of the future, he would say, and the places you could go.

It smells of cologne. 

In a low timbre, he asks you to hand him a stack of papers from the office, and you diligently obey, squeezing the files between the sleeves of the jacket as your legs waddle from room to room until they reach the kitchen table where he sits hunched over a mug of coffee. The pages land in a messy pile at the center, and you apologize instinctively, bowing your head in shame.

But he simply laughs and places his hand on your head, rustling your hair (growing now, reaching past your shoulders in a way that your mother looks at and advises you on how to care for it), and reassures you of your success. 

You nod respectfully in response.

_ “Good girl.” _

  
  
  
  
  


When you’re four years old, she calls you a boy.

Your hair is shorter at the time, and you never wear skirts or dresses if you can help it. They feel odd on your body, like they could fly away at any moment, and you want to jump and play without the worry of getting reprimanded by fretful adults. But there’s nothing inherently repulsive about them. Pants are just more comfortable, tight against your skin, always present and everlasting. 

On a sunny day, you run through the small playground and feel the breeze against your chest, laughing and skipping across the wood chips and stone platforms. She leaps along at your side, humming softly to herself a small tune from one of the shows they like to play on the radio before nap time. Something about gummy bears and dancing dolls; you can never understand it.

You want to play on the swings. Or maybe the slide? Or maybe you can throw around the softballs, or use the chalk in the bucket to play hopscotch, or just sit on the pavement and draw to your heart’s content. Anything, really, to go about the day.

“Why don’t we play pretend?” she asks, once enough time has passed for both of you to become bored. “We can be a family. I’ll be the mom, and you’ll be the dad.” 

“Why am I the dad?”

She tilts her head, looks at you oddly, pale skirt rustling in the wind. “Because you’re a boy, and I’m a girl.”

_ You’re a boy. _

“I’m not a boy.”

She frowns. “What do you mean you’re not a boy? You look like one.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I’m not!”

“Yes, you are!”

_ (Louder.) _

“I’m not!”

“You are!”

“Nuh-uh!”

“Uh-huh!”

On and on, a childish argument, until tears prick at your eyes and feet stomp at the ground and your voice screams so hoarse that the adults run over and tell you to apologize for making a fuss and tell her to apologize for trying to insist that you are something you are not. You avoid each other after the argument, but youth begets fickleness - after enough time has passed, you’re back to being friends again, all previous tension forgotten.

Sometime in the future, you look back on the memory and wonder where that girl from before has gone.

  
  
  
  
  


Every year, ever since your sister grew old enough to walk through the kitchen without constant supervision, the two of you bake a strawberry cake for your mother’s birthday. 

It’s nothing particularly special, just a sponge cake recipe with fruit in between and store-bought frosting coating the sides. You attempt to follow the instructions that Emi found online, but the result never quite looks exactly like the picture provided. Sometimes it’s lopsided, sometimes the cut through the cake is uneven, sometimes the entire table just breaks and the two of you are left to grapple with whatever didn’t end up falling on the floor. 

Your mother had rushed to the kitchen that year, calling your names in an urgent tone before appearing just as quickly within the doorframe, only to encounter the panicked scramblings of unruly children coated head-to-toe in fruity jam and powdered sugar. Time stopped with a beat of silence - and continued with a jolt, peals of laughter echoing off the walls.

You can’t remember how the finished cake tasted, only that your face was sore from smiling so much. 

Chaos brought help, and help brought happiness, and you almost wish you could replicate those earliest moments of clumsiness so that the warmth of the memory could return to reality, however little possible. Surely it would be better than the unease swirling in your gut, the laughter you show instinctively rather than meaningfully that sends a wave of guilt over your mind. 

“Ah,” your mother sighs with a light smile, “I have the best daughters in the world.”

Emi giggles beside you, and you duck your head to hide the way your brow furrows and your muscles tense. 

A voice whispers inside your head to just tell her, tell them both of your thoughts and struggles so they stop treating you like the child they see you as. Reveal yourself so that you can live authentically and stop lying to those who should be closest - they are family, after all - as you find some sense of inward stability. But you don’t even know how you would broach the topic - never mind the question of how they should refer to you in the future. It all seems too daunting. 

Both your mother and your sister burst into laughter, and you jerk back into awareness. They’re looking at you expectantly. You can only stare back in response.

Time ticks by.

Finally, when it becomes obvious you do not know how to answer, your sister pouts and shoves at your arm, scolding you for not responding to your mother’s question, because did you space out again? She can’t do everything for you forever, you know, especially once you get older. How are you going to survive once you leave for university?

Your mother laughs softly, so very gently, and waves off the mistake with a quick motion and a short sentence. She’s still smiling. 

How selfless she is, and how selfish you are. 

Of all the days to make everything about yourself, you choose the day where everyone should be celebrating another? Your mother is kind and supportive, sweet and caring, deserves all the goodness of the world, and what do you give her? A cake filled with eggshells, a nonexistent presence, and some barely concealed hints of something gone wrong. Of all the days to be worried about your own issues.

What a burden child. The least you could do is laugh a little.

So you do.

  
  
  
  
  


It’s a constant reminder with every interaction.

_ (“Excuse me, ma’am?” “I’m sorry miss, but we cannot accept your offer.” “Young lady, speak up back there, nobody can hear you.” “She’s been kinda quiet, do you know if she’s okay?” “What’s wrong, sweetie?”) _

To the world, you will always be a dainty little girl, meek and delicate and proper and obedient.

And you don’t try to correct them, don’t try to correct yourself.

You’re too scared of the consequences.

_ (What a coward.) _

  
  
  
  
  


The echo of the shower runs in the background, and your reflection gazes back at you in the bathroom mirror with a blank stare and pursed lips.

It’s become almost a ritual of sorts, looking at your bare form while the water heats up from ice cold to lukewarm. Underneath the yellow-tinted lights you can see everything - the warped curvature of your spine, the sunspots on your sternum, the hair along your underarms and stomach, the jutted angle of your collarbones against skin -

\- the roundness of your chest, the width of your hips, the angle of your chin, the thing that sits lower along your body  _ down there _ -

None of it bothers you. Or, at the very least, none of it bothered you before. 

Most people are already quick to reassure on that point, yet you still feel like some kind of entitled intruder, stepping into a zone in which you are entirely unwelcome for all the right reasons. How could you claim to be when so long ago you were perfectly happy when you were not? How could you be so quick to say when you are so unsure? How could you so readily deceive others of your own legitimacy?

And so you desperately search for all signs of discomfort, of proof that you can cling to and point at as a token of truth and authenticity in your life - evidence of something real. After all, if you truly existed as you claim to be, wouldn’t you be able to explain something so simple? 

(But then again, if you spend so much effort to pursue something that should be so obviously tangible, isn’t that just more evidence of you simply being wrong?)

The person in the mirror blinks, slowly.

You can’t tell which is the mask anymore, the girl who lives to please the onlookers or the boy who barely exists outside of conscious awareness. Neither feels right to claim for yourself, neither makes sense to your muddled mind - “you” as an entity blurs into nebulous thoughts and routine behaviors. Even now, without the meddling affairs of others, your own existence does not make sense.

What does a person do then, when what should be so apparent is so inconceivable? Perhaps the right answer would be to just give up and let the original override your psyche, but even that no longer provides any comfort - only another flimsy facade to an ever growing list.

With each new situation the performance continues onward, and you, tight in its grasp, are left to follow its command. Switch your costume with each act. Bow obediently to your audience. Dance with vigor. Sing. Perform. 

The audience whispers under the shadows by their seats. Who is the one underneath the disguise? Certainly someone of little importance, if they are never brought to light. 

Sometimes you wish you weren’t so afraid of making a mistake, terrified of failure in a way that freezes your core and makes your knees lock in place as the world continues to spin to its mundane beat. Maybe then you would finally have the courage to fully assert yourself - arrange “you” into a comprehensible form and remove all pretenses of false confidence into one that can truly be acknowledged - however unlikely. Live in a world where it’s okay to be wrong, change according to what you feel is right, adapt until you settle down into a comfortable niche and feel free to spread your limbs across its borders. Exist within liberation, freedom of expression. 

But of course to you - someone so weak and craven and undeniably undeserving - such a wish is foolish to consider in the first place. “You” who is uncomfortable when silenced and silent when asked is not worthy of the world’s benevolence.

So you continue to act, to put on your little play, even as paint chips off and cracks appear along the surface and dust showers down behind you and piles into streaks along the floor, because if you don’t make an effort to rip it off yourself then why should anyone else even bother to try?

  
  
  
  
  


The stage is filled with people 

There’s so many, some you can recognize and others you cannot, all of them holding a mask close to their body. A few take them off only when surrounded by others, hanging limply by their sides until the crowd parts and they hide their faces from the watchful audience. The veterans tend to keep them off longer, hanging from their sides to quickly be put on if need be. 

Everyone gathers together, laughs with each other when the curtains close and moves with purpose when they open once again. You recognize your friends standing by your side, in front of you, behind you, surrounding you.

To your left, a mop of red hair, a flashy skirt billowing with their movements, a quick wink and a snap of their fingers when meeting someone amiable, and a menacing aura to those who are not.

To your right, a tall and resolute figure, a jacket slung over their shoulders, a propensity to solitude, yet still giving their quiet support along the way. 

It isn’t right to compare your growth to others. And you realize this, to a degree. You do not know their everyday struggles, do not see what they experience, so it is impossible for you to ever make the judgement. Anything you think about them would be assuming too much, and anything you think about yourself is lacking the viewpoint they may offer. 

But you feel the heaviness of your masks backstage, you hear the idle chatter of others in the background that you know you cannot join. And it doesn’t make sense, how everyone else can at least take off their weights when with those who are close but you still cannot even bring yourself to do so with those who understand.

This is simply an impossible task for you. After contemplating it for so long, that answer is the only one that solves your dilemma.

If you can barely break it off when around others like you, when will you ever? Strangers bring the possibility of threat, and acquaintances bring the chance of ostracization. This place, which should be the one where you are briefly freed of your chains, only seem to wind them tighter. Your voice is silenced in this space of collective solitude.

Perhaps you are simply a fraud. But no one can say, and neither can you. 

And that knowledge brings you closer to the answer, the one which says you will never truly stop deceiving the world or yourself, and that’s okay. You know your place. 

Nothing is wrong, you tell yourself and others.

Nothing is wrong, and that’s the truth you will live. 

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be a vent fic but I'm terrible at dealing with my thoughts so it's kinda just a jumbled mess whoops
> 
> Also since school started I'm not gonna update much in general....I meant to put out another chapter to CCC or post something else I was working on but then those two flopped and I got nervous so I guess this'll have to do, hopefully you enjoyed something out of it at least


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